Ripensare la pace

Abstract

In this article, peace is conceptualised in a dynamic way. This new perspective requires radically new actions that do not focus on the opposition to war and violence, but aim to remove "the ground under the feet" of violence by imagining different worlds capable of achieving peace understood not as an end to war or to violence but as fullness of life for all. Alongside a process characterised by opposition and struggle against existing powers, albeit with non-violent methods, there is, in fact, another possibility: building the new reality from below without explicitly opposing the old one. This is what happens with the first Christian communities, in particular the Pauline communities which, without explicitly opposing the existing order, in their daily actions, they ignore it by building a new and completely alternative reality to the existing one. This new look involves the replacement of rigid binary classifications with classifications based on so-called "fuzzy" sets, not only with two values (peace/war, peace/nonviolence), but also capable of including zones of uncertainty through which to pass gradually. The proposed examples of the construction of "new worlds", taken from radically different contexts linked to the conflicts of the last century, will serve to illustrate this new perspective.

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